Patches
by Misaia
Summary: As useful as the 21st century is, it would still appear that it still has some rather bothersome flaws, namely: 1. The newfangled devices in the kitchen are all out on a quest for Steve's blood 2. A "Tinder" is not actually something used to start a fire and 3. Apple Maps just can't seem to help him find his way around his own feelings. Or any other place, for that matter.
1. Scheduled

I've started living my life very strictly according to schedule. If you'd thought I was anal retentive as a soldier back in WW2, well, you'd be dead by now, probably. On the off hand that you aren't, you'd see that I've gotten more timetable-oriented and have developed some sort of odd fanaticism about living minute to minute all according to a prewritten plan. The telephones today are tremendously convenient for doing such a thing; the one that Natasha got me is something called an Apple iPhone: it's fascinating, the way you can touch the screen and the little icons and play games or send messages or read the news. It's also enormously useful for planning out my day, and I'm really quite grateful to her for purchasing it for me, but she just brushed it off and told me it came from SHIELD funds or something of the sort. I personally think she was bluffing, as she didn't quite meet my eye, but she just told me not to worry about where it came from.

I'm sure it had nothing to do with the police officers who came to my door a few hours later and held up their badges, all official-like, and started babbling something at me about GPS trackers and stolen merchandise. They were throwing so much technical jargon around that I ended up calling Nick Fury on my iPhone, and a few minutes later he just...dropped down out of the sky, all huge and terrifying and positively menacing, and called the police officers some very...explicit expletives that I can't say. They were quite derogatory, but the police officers looked quite cowed (perhaps it was Nick's threatening posture and the fact that he's also missing an eye and goes around wearing an eyepatch like a pirate) and backed away with apologies.

6 AM: Wake up. My iPhone sounds like a foghorn at 6 AM on the dot, just like the sound I used to wake up to as a child in Brooklyn, stumbling out of the house with Bucky dragging me behind him, rubbing frantically at my eyes as we reached the top of the hill a mile or so away from our houses, watching as the sun tipped over the outline of the bay and the lighthouses sounded their calls to guide the ships into safe harbor.

I've asked Natasha what's happened to Bucky, if there was any news about him from the 1940s; really, I've asked her if I can have another memory of him besides the last one, where he was falling, falling, falling, stretching and reaching out for my hand as if I could save him one last time, the fear and resignation spiking deep through his dark brown eyes as he realised that I couldn't catch him, that I was no superhero, that I was just an ordinary man who could afford to take a few more chances than most. She's hedged a bit, looked over to the side and scuffed her toes into my linoleum floor, and told me that she personally couldn't answer that. I wonder what she's hiding from me, but it's probably not such a good idea to press her. I've seen her at the SHIELD gym, bench-pressing barbells that probably weigh twice as much as she does.

6:10 AM: I go run a few laps around Central Park after brushing my teeth. It's certainly changed since the last time I've been here, but then again, I suppose most things do change after 70 or so years. That's just the way the world works.

7:00 AM: Obligatory bathroom trip, a shower, a shave, and brushing my teeth for the second time. They've apparently got toothpaste in all kinds of flavours these days. I'm partial to the cinnamon, myself. And don't get me started on the vast variety of shampoos and aftershaves and colognes they've got at the department stores. Natasha went out with me to buy my toiletries, and when I stood for a solid two minutes in the shampoo aisle trying to work up the courage to ask why hair hydration was so important (I wasn't under the impression that hair drank water, or that the biology of hair was similar to that of a plant...perhaps hair photosynthesized?), she elbowed me in the ribs and told me to just pick one that I liked the smell of. We ended up bringing home a green bottle shaped like a fish with a red cap that promises it's tear-free (at this, I imagined some poor person rubbing some other, lesser brand of shampoo into their hair and sobbing, but Natasha told me it meant nothing of the sort, and also mocked me for buying a children's shampoo. I see no problem with this).

7:30 AM: I make breakfast for myself, usually eggs and toast and coffee. The coffeemaker Nick set up in my kitchen is one of these newfangled devices where you stick a little cup of flavoring in the top and the coffee comes out the bottom. A really interesting, really complicated gadget. I cannot speak so highly of the toaster, however; it is fond of burning me and not actually toasting the bread, despite its hellish temperature. I remember Howard Stark once had some plans going for artificial intelligence, where he tried to mimic human intelligence and communication in inanimate machines. Perhaps his ideas have worked out, and the toaster is one such example.

9 AM: I head over to NYU with my sketchpad and pencils. I've enrolled in some art courses; I've always wanted to go to art school, but being in one of the worst wars in US history kind of throws a wrench into those plans. The teacher tells me that I'm an exceptional figure drawer, although I lack creativity and keep drawing the same features over and over, producing people with dark eyes and dark hair that curls over their forehead and a mouth that quirks up at the corner. Believe me, I've tried to draw people as they really appear, but I just happen to suddenly look down and there are the dark hair and eyes that I know so well. Dark eyes and dark hair can't be too uncommon in the population, surely, so perhaps I'll run into that person one day and just know that they're the one for me. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you don't, I've always been sappy like that.

12 AM: Lunch. I love lunch.

1 PM: I sit with Natasha for a few hours and she educates me about some of the newer things in the 21st century. Just the other day, she showed me how to operate the little black box embedded in the wall in my kitchen, which she called a microwave. She put a bowl of food inside, and I watched as it spun round and round in a circle, almost knocking her over when it beeped and announced that the food was ready. Lately, she hasn't been around much, so I've just been browsing the Internet and looking through online news articles. That's about the extent of my computer knowledge.

6 PM: Dinner. Dinner is also fantastic. Sometimes Nick eats with me and stabs his steak with a knife that looks lethal, and it's quite the sight, him just staring at me over the table with that eye of his and popping steak into his mouth with the edge of his knife while I attempt to make polite conversation. (It's actually downright awkward, but God forbid I let him hear me saying that.)

8 PM: I watch a television show or a movie, and attempt to catch up on pop culture. It still baffles me. How could people possibly care where that celebrity went to get their nails painted or who that singer got caught kissing backstage?

9 PM: Bedtime. I must say sleeping is an excellent activity, and I do highly recommend it, although I do have the oddest dreams. A little child saying something about The Whisper Man and Captain America, a middle school student complaining about one of his friends, a young man reading to me from a history textbook. His features are always the same, dark eyes, dark hair, slender hands, and perhaps this is why I can't draw any other kinds of features. It's a mystery to me, really.

Today was a day like any other. I got up, went for a run, ate breakfast, went to class, ate again, and waited patiently for Natasha to drop by my apartment. She'd apologised for being so busy the past few days, but she was definitely going to come today. I checked my phone, checked it again an instant later, as if she might have texted in the millisecond I looked away. 1:15 PM. And she hadn't said anything. Her message screen didn't even have the dots to tell me she was writing something, and I felt a bit miffed at being blown off so easily.

She burst in the door at 1:23 PM, her hair wild and ringing her face like a fiery halo. She didn't even acknowledge me before she reached for the television remote and flicked it on. I opened my mouth to say something, but she shushed me and changed the channel to the news, told me to just shut up and watch.

I don't usually watch the afternoon news, I prefer the evening ones, but the picture to the left of the announcer's face had me silent and gaping at the screen.

It's him. It's really him. It's the one, that boy I've been gabbing on about all this time, with the dark, confident eyes flecked with gold specks, a strand of chestnut brown hair curling over his forehead, his mouth quirking up one corner as he smirked at the camera. He feels so familiar, feels so much like at home, and I just stare at his picture, losing myself in his eyes even as the announcer says something about "Stark Industries," "recently found in the Middle east," "billionaire," "critical condition."

"The reason I bring this up," Natasha says, voice drowning out the announcer's and interrupting my reverie, "is that we'll probably be meeting him sometime soon. He's round at Nick's, or something. Or holed up in that penthouse apartment of his or wherever he lives, wouldn't surprise me if he had the Empire State Building as his personal residence, he's worth something like $200 billion or something obscene like that -"

I tune out Natasha and turn back to the screen, where he's still smiling at me, his gaze cool and confident, and for the first time in almost a year, I find myself thrown completely off schedule.


	2. Name

A few weeks later, he comes in, looking nothing at all like the cool, confident, absolutely collected young man I'd seen in the photographs on the television and the newspaper articles that Natasha had given him to read over. No. In fact, Tony comes to me in pieces, literal pieces, sitting down heavily at the glass-topped dining table and keeping a hand placed protectively over his chest. In the gaps between his fingers, a soft blue light is pulsing in irregular increments, and even as I watch, he grimaces a little bit, his eyes closing and his brows furrowing as though he's in intense pain, curling and hunching his shoulders over his chest, taking in a deep hissing breath that whistles through the clutch of his teeth. Nick bangs his hands down on the table, and Tony jumps in surprise, biting down on his lip and closing his eyes as an honest-to-God cog pops out from between his fingers and clatters onto the table with a little series of clinks. He's clammy and pale, and I've got a really hard time equating the young man in the pictures with the one in front of me. He looks like he's aged about twenty years.

"This is Anthony Stark," Nick says, either ignoring or not caring about Tony's apparent discomfort. "I expect the two of you to try and get along." Before I can ask for the reasoning behind this strange request, Nick just straightens up, slaps his hands together for a bit as though dusting himself of us, and just tells us that he has a few plans for a few things. No other explanation before he just gets up and leaves.

I bite at my lip, twiddle my thumbs under the table, take a covert peek at Tony from under my lashes when I think he isn't looking. He is, his dark gaze - and oh, his eyes are just like I imagined, chocolate brown with flecks of green and gold - piercing through me, staring at me like he can't believe I'm sitting in front of him. I suppose it's not every day young multibillionaires with interesting physical oddities meet Captain America, I guess, but his eyes are tracing the contours of my face, a bit like what I do for my art classes, as though he's taking in every line and every plane. I've never felt quite so self-conscious.

"So...would you like a drink?" I ask him, this man with the unnerving stare, this man who has not yet said a word. I'm already out of my seat and standing at the fridge before he finally speaks.

"Steve."

I'm not sure what I was expecting. It is my name after all, but the way he says it is so familiar that I can't help but turn to him. I'm surprised to find him smiling a bit, the right corner of his mouth quirking up just like I expected, the little dimple in his cheek, just like I knew would be there. Natasha's told me a bit about deja vu, and though I'm not normally one to believe in coincidence and that sort of stuff, I can't help but feel that this has definitely, definitely happened before. It's startling and shocking, and I drop my eyes to the cool, unassuming cans of sparkling fruit juice that stand in neat rows on the shelves. When I look back up, he's looking away, drumming his fingers on the table, and I begin to wonder if I've imagined the whole thing.

The cans of fizzy orange juice are icy in my hands, and I set one down in front of him with a solid thunk. He looks up, looks down at the can of juice, back up at me.

"How are you liking my time?" he asks.

I've no idea how much/what he knows about me, wonder if Nick or Natasha's been giving him Captain America paraphernalia to read just like they gave me the link to his Wikipedia article and the history of Stark Industries in a nutshell. For the latter, I just skipped ahead to the part in the 1960s.

"It's...quite convenient," I answer carefully. It's a safe answer, a solid one that's unassuming and unoffending to all parties involved, though it isn't quite the truth.

He smiles at me. "You mean it's complicated. It's fast, it's noisy, and we don't have flying cars yet, like my father thought we might have."

I have to stop myself from unconsciously gaping at him. Granted, I hadn't been going to say any of that, certainly not to the multibillionaire owner of a technology mega-corporation, but he reads me so concisely and accurately that I begin to wonder if there's been mind-reading technology invented yet.

I clear my throat, stalling for time to come up with something else to say. "That's...er...quite an interesting contraption you've got there," I tell him, nodding in the direction of his chest, which is glowing blue circles through his dress shirt. "I mean, if it's okay to talk about it, I get it if it's something sensitive you don't want to mention or anything."

He arches an eyebrow at me, apparently not shocked or disturbed or even particularly surprised at this very direct remark. "Do you want to see it?" he asks, and before I can protest or say anything to dissuade him, he's slipping buttons through buttonholes and peeling away the fabric. His skin carries a slight tan, and pulsing waves of soft blue light ripple over the flesh. There are pieces of metal embedded directly in his skin, making a soft whirring as a fan spins somewhere inside it, and for a moment I think of science fiction movies, of monsters with artificial hearts, but then a little bead of blood trickles down his sternum with a particularly ominous sounding clunk from the circle, and he mutters a curse and presses a hand against it, drawing back rust-stained fingertips.

"Let me get you a cloth or something," I say, jumping up, but he just holds up a hand, tells me that water might damage the mechanism, and I slowly sit back down, trying to get up the nerve to ask him why.

"It's to keep me alive," he says simply, as though he's answered the question hundreds of times before. "There's metal near my heart and this reactor helps keep it from actually reaching it."

"Right," I say, nodding as if this all makes sense when in reality I'm horrendously technologically challenged and still have trouble trying to work the DVD player.

"I was thinking about you overseas," he says. "I've missed talking to you a lot, Steve."

This time, I really do gape at him. I've never talked to this boy in my life. Boy? I think to myself. Surely that's not right. He's already a young man, probably around the age I was when I had the serum injections, I've no right to be calling him "boy."

He looks up at me when I don't say anything, frowns at me.

"It's alright if you didn't miss me," he says, smiling and trying to shrug it off, but there's a hint of despair in the depths of those brown green gold eyes and I want to reach out and tell him that I don't mean it that I really do remember him, but that would make me a liar, and I'm not good enough at keeping track of mistruths in my head long enough for them to actually become full-fledged facts. "I'm sure you were probably busy reading or something. You had decades of historical events to catch up on."

Now I'm convinced he must be thinking of a different person. Perhaps the accident he was in that led to that mechanical reactor in his chest also gave him a concussion, or severe amnesia, or something. Because if you asked me to tell you what happened in 1970, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Because I don't know anything about what happened in 1970.

"Are you sure you've got the right person?" I ask him cautiously, because his face has gone pale again and he's rubbing at his chest with a grimace. "I'm not yet up to date with US history. Lately I've been reading accounts of the war, I mean, the one I was supposed to be in before the Tesseract and the Arctic crash and everything..."

He stares up at me blankly. "No," he says after a moment. "That's not right, that can't be right."

We stare at each other for so long that we both jump when someone bangs on the door. I hasten to open it, quickly step aside as a petite blonde woman in a pinstriped jacket and matching skirt marches in, her heels click clacking purposefully on the floor. She makes a beeline for Anthony, crossing her arms in front of her, and telling him quite sternly that he oughtn't to exert himself in this fashion, and that she'd just finished double and triple checking his personal accounts balances, and now it was time to be getting home, Jarvis was getting worried -

She buttons up his shirt with efficiency, each button sliding neatly and effortlessly into place, and drags him upright before clicking away out the door again. He sighs, running a hand through his hair and ruffling it up, before following her, and as I turn to watch his receding back, I wonder about the reason behind the squeezing in my chest, the feeling of abject desperation and acceptance that comes with being left behind not just once but again -

"I guess I'll be seeing you, Steve," he says, turning just a bit to face me before he disappears around the corner.

"I guess you will, Tony," I reply, and his eyes widen just a fraction before he smiles, the first genuine smile of the encounter, and opens his mouth to say something else, but a slender manicured hand whips out from the corner and grasps his sleeve to drag him away.


End file.
